"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"for 15 October 1998. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Greil Marcus

Investing the phrase "egg on your face" with rich, new significance,
Suck is proud to announce the recipients of its first annual Evil
Genius Grants. Over the next 10 days, the Suck EGG honorees, as
selected by Suck's blue ribbon panel of experts, will be profiled on
this page. Included are standouts in fields as diverse as pop music and
pop-music criticism, film acting and film directing,
magazine punditry and television punditry. But unlike those
humdrum, dime-per-dozen MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants, each Suck
EGG fellowship is offered not for such narrow purposes as "rewarding
outstanding achievement" or celebrating the "power and possibilities of
human creativity." Nor are they extended to those whose work represents
the "greatest benefit to mankind," like the recently announced Nobel
Prizes.

Instead, the Suck EGGs provide an infinitely more valuable service to
humanity: Namely, each fellowship is granted only on the condition that
for the next calendar year, in the interests of Human Civilization, its
recipients stop doing the voodoo that they do so annoyingly well.
(To prevent welshing, actual prizes are not conferred until the
completion of each term.) Those who aspire to the heights of EGGdom in
the future should realize that, by definition, it is impossible for us to
accept applications - since this is an award not for who you are, but
who you will cease to be.

- Sucksters

It might be
enough just to say that Greil Marcus is responsible for
unleashing
Gina Arnold as
a rock critic. But his verbal gymnastics - or at least step aerobics -
have spawned so many imitators that he must take
responsibility
for the last 20 years
of rock criticism. Mere public censure is
probably not enough punishment
for such a crime - a transgression
of this magnitude deserves
retribution in kind, like a lifetime
subscription to Punk Planet.

It's
Marcus whose inscrutable, Berkeley, California-bred theorizing created a genre of
music
writing that is hyperbolically personal and cutely political - and
somehow
still meaningless. Back in 1981, before everybody got into the act,
there was something laudable in the sheer
audaciousness of quoting Barthes in a Go-Gos review: "The pleasure of
the
Go-Gos' music is also the pleasure of people getting it right. It is
as
well the pleasure of responding to what Roland Barthes called
'the
materiality of the body.'" Indeed, Marcus' greatest gift and most
dangerous
legacy is his ability to string together the phrases "history of
punk rock,"
"pop music," "international capitalism," "revanchist politics,"
and "the
Rolling Stone's Let It Bleed" as though the dynamism of the whole
could make up for the feebleness of the parts.

And in doing so, he convinced a generation of writers that
grafting theory onto an obscure single was equal to writing about
music. In its mildest form, this kind of thinking produces mere
unintelligibility ("to quote
Marx and the Mekons quoting Marshall Berman
quoting Marx ..."). At times,
however, it can produce whole books, like his
1989 Harvard Press
pseudo-tome, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of Rock
and Roll, which
managed to stretch its associative vine-swinging over 200, tabloid-sized
pages.
Marcus convinced
this generation further that personal revelations ("I
kinda like Bruce
Springsteen!"), even embarrassing ones ("Fleetwood Mac
isn't so bad!"), are
actually critical watersheds - or can be portrayed as
such, if you couch
them in metaphors about politics.

There's a direct link, in
other words, from Greil Marcus to every two-bit
alt.weekly blurberator in
the country. Professor, we salute you!